By Lore Thaler, Liam Norman Echolocation is probably most associated with bats and dolphins. These animals emit bursts of sounds and listen to the echoes that bounce back to detect objects in their environment and to perceive properties of the objects (e.g. location, size, material). Bats, for example, can tell the distance of objects with high precision using the time delay between emission and echo, and are able to determine a difference in distance as small as one centimeter. This is needed for them to be able to catch insects in flight. People, remarkably, can also echolocate. By making mouth clicks, for example, and listening for the returning echoes, they can perceive their surroundings. Humans, of course, cannot hear ultrasound, which may put them at a disadvantage. Nonetheless, some people have trained themselves to an extraordinary level. Daniel Kish, who is blind and is a well-known expert echolocator, is able to ride his bicycle, hike in unfamiliar terrain, and travel in unfamiliar cities on his own. Daniel is the founder and president of World Access for the Blind, a non-profit charity in the US that offers training in echolocation alongside training in other mobility techniques such as the long cane. Since 2011, the scientific interest in human echolocation has gained momentum. For example, technical advances have made it feasible to scan people’s brains while they echolocate. This research has shown that people who are blind and have expertise in echolocation use ‘visual’ parts of their brain to process information from echoes. It has also been found that anyone with normal hearing can learn to use echoes to determine the sizes, locations, or distance of objects or to use it to avoid obstacles during walking. Remarkably, both blind and sighted people can improve their ability to interpret and use sound echoes within a session or two. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 23570 - Posted: 05.04.2017

A U.S.-based drug researcher who led a team that hunted through a massive database of patient records says the anesthetic ketamine shows potential as an antidepressant and should be further studied for its potential as a psychiatric drug. Doctors currently use ketamine to relieve pain during surgery and it is approved for that purpose. The drug's potential to relieve suicidal depression is also well known, but that information is based on anecdotes and small studies rather than a large clinical trial. Ruben Abagyan, a professor in the school of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of California San Diego, said ketamine is a "possible alternative treatment and definitely in particularly difficult cases." Those cases could include suicidal depression, where the weeks of treatment that traditional antidepressants require to take effect might be too long, Abagyan said. Search for beneficial signal Abagyan is the senior author of a study published in Wednesday's issue of the journal Scientific Reports, based on an analysis of a large U.S. database of adverse effect reports that were made for any reason. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's adverse effects database, which contains over 8 million patient records of reports made for a wide range of reasons, is normally used to look for potentially harmful side-effects. But in a twist, the researchers turned this on its head, looking for reduction in depression symptoms among patients who took ketamine. "If we can look at the reduction of their complaints about depression that can be a signal for the beneficial effect of ketamine," Abagyan said. ©2017 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 23569 - Posted: 05.04.2017

By Colleen Kimmett, Dr. Rebecca Carey admits to being a little embarrassed about what her son, Mark, eats every day. Hamburger patties for breakfast, or bacon. A pack of raisins and a cookie for lunch; a turkey and cheese sandwich “if I’m lucky,” says Carey, but it usually comes back home. His favorite dinner is fish cakes and pasta, but all vegetables remain firmly untouched. It’s the kind of diet—low in fruits and vegetables, high in carbs—that a doctor like herself might caution against. But it’s also low in milk, sugar, and artificial food additives — all things Carey believes worsen 10-year-old Mark’s attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, symptoms. Twice a day, in the morning at their home in Newburgh, Ind., and from the school nurse at lunch, he takes a vitamin and mineral supplement, which helps make up for the lack of veggies. It’s been six months on this diet, which Carey researched herself and tested out on Mark, and in that time he has transitioned off his ADHD medication. It wasn’t all smooth sailing; there were fights in the candy section of the grocery store, and Carey struggled to find quick, high-protein breakfasts. “But honestly, I would never go back,” she said. Carey is not the only one who’s trying this approach. Medication and therapy remain the most effective treatments for ADHD. But driven by concerns about the short- and long-term side effects of psychiatric medications on children, some parents are looking for ways to keep their kids on lower doses of the drugs, or to quit the drugs entirely. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 23568 - Posted: 05.04.2017

Jon Hamilton A little spit may help predict whether a child's concussion symptoms will subside in days or persist for weeks. A test that measures fragments of genetic material in saliva was nearly 90 percent accurate in identifying children and adolescents whose symptoms persisted for at least a month, a Penn State team told the Pediatric Academic Societies Meeting in San Francisco, Calif. In contrast, a concussion survey commonly used by doctors was right less than 70 percent of the time. If the experimental test pans out, "a pediatrician could collect saliva with a swab, send it off to the lab and then be able to call the family the next day," says Steven Hicks, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Penn State Hershey. Hicks helped develop the test and consults for a company that hopes to market concussion tests. A reliable test would help overcome a major obstacle in assessing and treating concussions, which affect more than one million children and adolescents in the U.S. each year. Many of the injuries are related to sports. In most cases, concussion symptoms last only a few days. But up to 25 percent of young patients "go on to have these prolonged headaches, fatigue, nausea, and those symptoms can last sometimes one to four months," Hicks says. And, right now, there's no way to know which kids are going to have long-term problems, he says. "Parents often say that their biggest concern is, 'When is my child going to be back to normal again?' " Hicks says. "And that's something we have a very difficult time predicting." © 2017 npr

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 23567 - Posted: 05.04.2017

Laura Sanders An electrode on top of a newborn’s scalp, near the soft spot, can measure when the baby feels pain. The method, described online May 3 in Science Translational Medicine, isn’t foolproof, but it brings scientists closer to being able to tell when infants are in distress. Pain assessment in babies is both difficult and extremely important for the same reason: Babies don’t talk. That makes it hard to tell when they are in pain, and it also means that their pain can be more easily overlooked, says Carlo Bellieni, a pediatric pain researcher at the University Hospital Siena in Italy. Doctors rely on a combination of clues such as crying, wiggling and facial grimacing to guess whether a baby is hurting. But these clues can mislead. “Similar behaviors occur when infants are not in pain, for example if they are hungry or want a cuddle,” says study coauthor Rebeccah Slater of the University of Oxford. By relying on brain activity, the new method promises to be a more objective measurement. Slater and colleagues measured brain activity in 18 newborns between 2 and 5 days old. Electroencephalography (EEG) recordings from electrodes on the scalp picked up collective nerve cell activity as babies received a heel lance to draw blood or a low-intensity bop on the foot, a touch that’s a bit like being gently poked with a blunt pencil. One electrode in particular, called the Cz electrode and perched on the top of the head, detected a telltale neural spike between 400 and 700 milliseconds after the painful event. This brain response wasn’t observed when these same babies received a sham heel lance or an innocuous touch on the heel. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2017

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 23566 - Posted: 05.04.2017

By Simon Makin The past few decades have seen intensive efforts to find the genetic roots of neurological disorders, from schizophrenia to autism. But the genes singled out so far have provided only sketchy clues. Even the most important genetic risk factors identified for autism, for example, may only account for a few percent of all cases. Much frustration stems from the realization that the key mutations elevating disease risk tend to be rare, because they are less likely to be passed on to offspring. More common mutations confer only small risks (although those risks become more significant when calculated across an entire population). There are several other places to look for the missing burden of risk, and one surprising possible source has recently emerged—an idea that overturns a fundamental tenet of biology and has many researchers excited about a completely new avenue of inquiry. Accepted dogma holds that—although every cell in the body contains its own DNA—the genetic instructions in each cell nucleus are identical. But new research has now proved this assumption wrong. There are actually several sources of spontaneous mutation in somatic (nonsex) cells, resulting in every individual containing a multitude of genomes—a situation researchers term somatic mosaicism. “The idea is something that 10 years ago would have been science fiction,” says biochemist James Eberwine of the University of Pennsylvania. “We were taught that every cell has the same DNA, but that's not true.” There are reasons to think somatic mosaicism may be particularly important in the brain, not least because neural genes are very active. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 23565 - Posted: 05.04.2017

By Elizabeth Pennisi When, 6 years ago, divers captured on video a cuckolding attempt among squidlike animals called cuttlefish, experts were stunned. “The violence was beyond anything we had ever seen in the laboratory,” says Roger Hanlon, an ecologist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, who had been studying captive cuttlefish for years. Now, by carefully analyzing the behavior of the two males involved, he and his colleagues suggest the stepwise escalation of their fight likely required more brainpower than many researchers thought invertebrates had, they report this week in American Naturalist. The video (above) first shows a common European male cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) mating with a female. While he escorts her to where she will lay her eggs, a second male suddenly appears and chases him away. But the first male doesn’t give up, and as his rival starts to get fresh with the female, the scuffle gets ever more intense. The rivals squirt ink at each other and jet about. Then, their dark markings turn even darker, and they engage in a quick battle of biting, grappling, and cork-screwing that soon sends the intruder scurrying off. Now that the scientists know how such explosive situations come about, they hope to recreate those circumstances in the lab to study male rivalries more systematically. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science. A

Keyword: Aggression; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 23564 - Posted: 05.04.2017

By Christof Koch | Imagine you are an astronaut, untethered from your safety line, adrift in space. Your damaged radio lets you hear mission control's repeated attempts to contact you, but your increasingly desperate cries of “I'm here, I'm here” go unacknowledged—you are unable to signal that you're alive but injured. After days and weeks of fruitless pleas from your loved ones, their messages cease. You become lost to the world. How long do you keep your sanity when you are locked in your own echo chamber? Days? Months? Years? This nightmarish scenario is vividly described by British neuroscientist Adrian Owen in his upcoming book Into the Gray Zone (Scribner). Taking my evening bath while dipping into its opening pages, I only put the book down after finishing hours later, with the water cold. The story of communicating with the most impaired neurological patients at a greater distance from us than an astronaut lost in space is told by Owen in a most captivating manner. A professor at Western University in Ontario, Canada, Owen pioneered brain-imaging technology to establish what islands of awareness persist in patients with severe disorders of consciousness. These people are bedridden and seriously disabled, unable to speak or otherwise articulate their mental state following traumatic brain injury, encephalitis, meningitis, stroke, or drug or alcohol intoxication. Two broad groups can be distinguished among those who do not quickly succumb to their injuries. Vegetative state patients, in the first group, cycle in and out of sleep. When they are awake, their eyes are open, but attempts to establish bedside communications with them—“if you hear me, squeeze my hand or look down”—meet only with failure. These patients can move their eyes or head, swallow and yawn but never in an intentional manner. Nothing is left but surviving brain stem reflexes. With proper nursing care to avoid bedsores and infections, these individuals can live for years. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 23563 - Posted: 05.02.2017

Jon Brooks Max, age 13, is agender — neither male nor female. When referring to Max, you don't use "he" or "she;" you use "they." Once strictly a pronoun of the plural variety, "they" is now doing double duty as singular, too — referring to individuals, like Max, who do not see gender as an either/or option. (NPR agreed not to use Max's last name, because the family feared the sort of online threats that have been made to other transgender families.) If the whole he/she pronoun thing feels awkward to you, Max is sympathetic — and patient. 'We are seeing more and more kids saying, 'You know what? What's with this either-or business? What's with this boy-girl and you have to fit in one box or the other?' " Diane Ehrensaft, psychologist, Child and Adolescent Gender Center, UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital "I can't expect anyone to use the right pronouns for me because it's not a thing that people know," Max tells me. "It's been great being myself, but it's also been really hard for people to get it, and for even family to get pronouns and stuff." We're talking in Max's room at home, where posters on the wall showcase the teen's love of theater: Peter Pan, Tarzan, The Pirates of Penzance. Max is old enough now to enjoy using make-up — blush, foundation, lipstick — but still young enough to enjoy going with their mom to see "Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory." (The review from Max: Gene Wilder's great!) From these surroundings, you wouldn't think the room's occupant is someone who has already poked and prodded at the most fundamental sense of who they are. Really, this is just a kid's room. © 2017 npr

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 23562 - Posted: 05.02.2017

Miriam E. Tucker In July 2012, a science reporter for The Washington Post, Brian Vastag, was in Wisconsin visiting his family when a high fever hit. He became instantly bedridden with flu-like symptoms that never went away. "It didn't feel like anything I'd ever had before. ... The things that distinguished it were the dizziness and the feeling of unreality in the head," Vastag says. Now, nearly five years later, the 45-year-old can no longer concentrate or read even a few sentences without becoming exhausted. A short walk to the mailbox means lying down for the rest of the day. In September, he'll qualify for Medicare due to his disability. That level of severity isn't the picture most people — including physicians — think of when they hear the term "chronic fatigue syndrome." But that was the diagnosis Vastag finally received after 18 months of visiting numerous doctors, submitting countless vials of blood and initially being misdiagnosed with West Nile virus. Actually, Vastag's condition is now termed "myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome," or ME/CFS for short, and is estimated to affect at least 1 million people in the U.S. alone. Many with the condition dislike the name "chronic fatigue syndrome" because they feel it's trivializing and misleading, giving the impression that they're simply tired or depressed when in fact many are quite ill. Nailing down the cause — or, more likely, causes — of the illness has proven exceptionally difficult, since patients' symptoms vary tremendously. © 2017 npr

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 23561 - Posted: 05.02.2017

Nicola Davis From Beyoncé to Benedict Cumberbatch, celebrities have flocked to diets based on intermittent fasting, but it turns out such regimes might be less effective than previously thought. Among the diets experiencing a boom in popularity is the alternate-day fasting diet – a regime many experts believed would be more palatable than daily calorie counting for those hoping to lose weight. But a new study suggests it is tougher to stick to than expected, making it no better than a traditional diet in helping people to shed the pounds. “We thought that it would be easier to stick to alternate-day fasting, just because you get that day off every [other] day where you don’t have to diet,” said Krista Varady, co-author of the research from the University of Illinois at Chicago. “We were really just expecting the traditional [daily diet] group to cheat a lot more.” Writing in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, Varady and colleagues from four US institutions described how they recruited 100 overweight or obese participants, 86% of whom were women, and randomly allocated them to one of three regimes: eating as normal, daily calorie counting and an alternate-day fasting diet. For the first month all participants ate as normal, after which they spent six months on their allocated diet. In the fasting diet, participants consumed 25% of their normal daily calorie intake on the “fast” day, and 125% the following “feast” day, while the calorie-restricted group consumed 75% of their normal calorie intake every day. The third group made no changes to their typical diet.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 23560 - Posted: 05.02.2017

By Ariana Eunjung Cha Congress unveiled a bipartisan budget late Sunday that contains a number of welcome surprises for researchers who had been panicking since March, when President Trump proposed deep funding cuts for science and health. Under the deal, the National Institutes of Health will get a $2 billion boost in fiscal year 2017, as it did the previous year. Trump had proposed cutting the NIH budget by about one-fifth, or $6 billion, in a draft 2018 budget. The NIH budget continues support for key areas of research, such as precision medicine and neuroscience, that were priorities under President Barack Obama; adds funding to target diseases such as Alzheimer's and cancer; and combats emerging threats such as antibiotic-resistant infections. Here are some of the big research winners: 1) Cancer: 2) Alzheimer's: Alzheimer's is now the sixth leading cause of death in the United States, yet it remains a mystery in terms of its cause and possible treatments. Public health experts expect the number of Americans with Alzheimer's to increase dramatically in the coming years as baby boomers age into their 70s and 80s. The new budget sets aside an additional $400 million for a total of $1.39 billion for Alzheimer's research. 5) BRAIN: Another Obama-era initiative, the Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies program, seeks to create a comprehensive guide to the anatomy and functioning of the brain. The budget includes $110 million for efforts to map the human brain. © 1996-2017 The Washington Post

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 23559 - Posted: 05.02.2017

By Mo Costandi The world is an unpredictable place. But the brain has evolved a way to cope with the everyday uncertainties it encounters—it doesn’t present us with many of them, but instead resolves them as a realistic model of the world. The body’s central controller predicts every contingency, using its stored database of past experiences, to minimize the element of surprise. Take vision, for example: We rarely see objects in their entirety but our brains fill in the gaps to make a best guess at what we are seeing—and these predictions are usually an accurate reflection of reality. The same is true of hearing, and neuroscientists have now identified a predictive textlike brain mechanism that helps us to anticipate what is coming next when we hear someone speaking. The findings, published this week in PLoS Biology, advance our understanding of how the brain processes speech. They also provide clues about how language evolved, and could even lead to new ways of diagnosing a variety of neurological conditions more accurately. The new study builds on earlier findings that monkeys and human infants can implicitly learn to recognize artificial grammar, or the rules by which sounds in a made-up language are related to one another. Neuroscientist Yukiko Kikuchi of Newcastle University in England and her colleagues played sequences of nonsense speech sounds to macaques and humans. Consistent with the earlier findings, Kikuchi and her team found both species quickly learned the rules of the language’s artificial grammar. After this initial learning period the researchers played more sound sequences—some of which violated the fabricated grammatical rules. They used microelectrodes to record responses from hundreds of individual neurons as well as from large populations of neurons that process sound information. In this way they were able to compare the responses with both types of sequences and determine the similarities between the two species’ reactions. © 2017 Scientific American,

Keyword: Language; Attention
Link ID: 23558 - Posted: 05.01.2017

Irina Zhorov On July 17, 2014 Kurt Hinrichs, of Gladstone, Mo., went to bed early. As often happens, he woke in the middle of the night. When he tried to get out of bed, he crashed to the floor, which woke his wife, Alice. "At first it was like, 'What's going on?' " Alice says. "Are you dreaming? Are you sleepwalking?" Kurt wasn't responding to anything Alice asked him, so she called 911. "I [was] thinking, 'this is a nightmare,' " Kurt says. By the time the ambulance arrived, just a few minutes later, Kurt wasn't speaking and his entire right side was paralyzed. Paramedics recognized that Kurt was having a stroke. When they wheeled Kurt out of the house, Alice thought he might never come home again. And if he did, he would be bedridden or in a wheelchair. "I really didn't have a lot of hope that my husband would be normal again, ever," she says. Speeding towards St. Luke's Hospital in Kansas City, Mo., Kurt realized this was no nightmare. He was awake, "but there was something major and massively wrong with me," Kurt says. About 800,000 people suffer strokes every year in the U.S. Most of them are ischemic strokes, caused by a clot which blocks a vessel supplying blood to the brain. If blood can't reach the brain, cells are deprived of oxygen and start to die. © 2017 npr

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 23557 - Posted: 05.01.2017

By Vicky Hallett Anything can happen while you’re performing karaoke at a dive bar in Scotland. As Lauren Marks found out 10 years ago at age 27, that includes having an aneurysm rupture in your brain. After being rushed to the hospital, the American actress/writer underwent emergency surgery that saved her life. But she lost two things that night: a single black high heel and much of her ability to use language. “A Stitch of Time,” her memoir that focuses on the year that followed, offers a deeply personal — and often surprising — perspective on aphasia, the medical term for this kind of communication disorder. The initial sensation, which Marks describes as “The Quiet,” was pleasurable. “The smallest of activities would enthrall me,” she writes. “Dressing myself, I was awed by the orbital distance between cloth and flesh. Brushing my teeth, I was enchanted by the stiffness of the bristles and the sponginess of my gums.” The Quiet, she explains, was what temporarily replaced her inner monologue. It was as muted as her external speech, which was initially limited to about 40 words. Beginning soon after she was stricken, Marks kept a journal, which she describes as initially “this confetti of fractured words.” Today, Marks can’t imagine what compelled her to scribble down “cathrene prussia horse-donk.” On the same page, she also wrote “speshul,” “Tibet” and “chorus.” © 1996-2017 The Washington Post

Keyword: Stroke; Language
Link ID: 23556 - Posted: 05.01.2017

By Dave A. Chokshi, In medicine, we speak of “seeing patients” when we are rounding in the hospital or caring for those who come to our clinics. But what about those people who may be sick but do not seek care? What is our responsibility to the patients we do not see? This question takes on greater urgency in the current political climate, as patients face the threat of losing health insurance. Renewed efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act leave millions wondering whether they will be covered. For me, as a physician practicing in the safety net, abstract numbers evoke the very real stories of my uninsured patients. One of my patients, whom I’ll call Elsa, had not seen a doctor since immigrating to the United States 15 years ago. That abruptly changed one morning: She awoke to find the room spinning around her and, terrifyingly, she could not articulate the words to explain to her husband what was going on. She was having a stroke. There are many reasons that patients like Elsa may not seek care – until they have no choice. Although she felt no symptoms before her stroke, Elsa was one of about 13 million U.S. adults with undiagnosed high blood pressure. I wondered if making her aware of her blood pressure would have been enough to avoid her suffering. But even if high blood pressure may sit atop the list of problems I write out, from his or her perspective it may not crack the top five. Food security, job stability, child care and affordable housing understandably feel more urgent. Time and again, I have learned that taking care of my patients starts by trying to walk a mile in their shoes. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Stroke; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 23555 - Posted: 05.01.2017

Amy Maxmen Psychedelic drugs could soon help people, including soldiers, who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder with the pain of recalling traumatic memories. Psychologists have occasionally given people psychedelic drugs such as LSD or magic mushrooms to induce altered states, in an attempt to treat mental illness. Today, many of those drugs are illegal, but if clinical trials testing their efficacy yield positive results, a handful could become prescription medicines in the next decade. The furthest along in this process is MDMA — a drug sold illegally as ecstasy or Molly — which is showing promise in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Last week, at the Psychedelic Science 2017 conference in Oakland, California, researchers presented unpublished results from phase II trials involving a total of 107 people diagnosed with PTSD. The trial treatment involved a combination of psychotherapy and MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine). The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reviewed these data in November, which were not released to the public at the time. The agency recommended that the researchers move forward with phase III trials, the final stage before potential approval of the drug. At the conference, researchers affiliated with the non-profit organization that is sponsoring the trials, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in Santa Cruz, California, presented some of their latest resutls. They used a cinically validated scale that assesses PTSD symptoms such as frequency of nightmares and anxiety levels. More than one year after two or three sessions of MDMA-assisted therapy, about 67% of participants no longer had the illness, according to that scale. About 23% of the control group — who received psychotherapy and a placebo drug — experienced the same benefit. © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Stress
Link ID: 23554 - Posted: 04.29.2017

Elizabeth Eaton Researchers have pinpointed a gene that keeps important brain cells in mice from crossing their wires, providing a possible link between brain wiring and mood disorders like depression. Without the gene, called Pcdhαc2, mice acted more depressed, researchers report April 28 in Science. Nerve cells, or neurons, that produce the chemical messenger molecule serotonin extend long projections called axons to various parts of the brain. Serotonin released from the tips of the axons signal other neurons in these target areas to influence mood and other aspects of behavior. For efficient signaling, the axon tips must be properly spaced. In the new work, scientists from New York City, St. Louis and China found that such spacing is disrupted in mice lacking the Pcdhαc2 gene. As a result, serotonin-signaling circuits are not properly assembled and the mice exhibited behaviors indicating depression. Pcdhαc2 is found in a cluster of genes that contain the blueprints for proteins that protrude from the surface of cells. These proteins work like ID cards, says study coauthor Joseph Dougherty, a neurogeneticist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. As serotonin neuron axons branch out through the brain, they can recognize other axons carrying identical IDs and spread out to keep out of each other’s paths. This process, called tiling, evenly spaces the axons in their target areas within the brain. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2017

Keyword: Depression; Brain imaging
Link ID: 23553 - Posted: 04.29.2017

By Abigail Beall You can’t eat, you can’t sleep and all you can think about is your next fix. You may be addicted to love. Intense romance can often come with symptoms resembling addiction – euphoria, craving, dependence, withdrawal and relapse – and brain scans have shown that it can be linked to drug-addiction-like activity in the brain’s reward centres. But the idea that people can be addicted to love is contentious. “It gets complicated because people disagree on the correct theory of addiction, and people especially disagree about what we mean when we use the term ‘love’ ”, says Brian Earp, at the Oxford University Centre for Neuroethics. “I think it is when you realise you do not want to be in love yet cannot avoid it, and it causes bad things, like abuse, that we cross the line into something addiction-like,” says Anders Sandberg, also at the Oxford University Centre for Neuroethics. Now Earp and his team have found evidence that there are in fact two different types of love addiction, after reviewing 64 studies of love and addiction published between 1956 and 2016. They found that people who feel desperately alone when not in a relationship, and try to replace an ex-partner straight away, could have what the team has called a “narrow” form of love addiction.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 23552 - Posted: 04.29.2017

By Brian Handwerk When you go to a movie or a concert with your friend, oftentimes it seems that you shared a similar experience. Your brains, you say, are on the same wavelength. Now, neurological science gives that phrase some new backing. Using new portable headsets that monitor brain activity, researchers have found that the brainwaves of people who are engaged in the same class really do “sync up.” Thanks to studies performed in laboratory settings, we had an inkling that this might be the case. A growing body of brain-scanning research is beginning to reveal how human brains display synchronicity—likely a key factor that makes many of our cooperative behaviors possible, from performance art to team sport. “If you pay more attention, you're more in sync,” explains Suzanne Dikker, a cognitive neuroscientist at both New York University and Utrecht University in the Netherlands and a co-author on the new study. “Now we've gone out there and confirmed that this is true in a real world setting,” she says. That remarkable feat was made possible thanks to portable electroencephalogram (EEG) headsets, which researchers used to monitor students' brain activity during an entire semester of biology classes at a New York high school. Each week, 12 high school seniors and their teacher attended class wearing the headsets, for a total of 11 classes overall. The more engaged those students were with their teacher and classmates, it turned out, the more their brainwave patterns were in sync with one another.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 23551 - Posted: 04.29.2017